NASLite Network Attached Storage

I got nothing for you then brother!

My girlfriend works at a college where they have all Dells and they are by and large junk! The only thing they got going for them is the fact that they exchange hardware fast and easy under warranty. I personally hate Dells, they are still alive in the business because they have cut quality to meet the price point. Never a good thing for the consumer...

I would simply kludge together another machine on the desk and see if it runs M2, quick and dirty. Then invest the time should it work out.

Best of luck man, sounds like you are going to need it.

Mike

Right I have some more data points for you guys. I've been saying for a while that I think this issue is a rogue file causing the DAAP daemon to go crazy. Through a very long and tedious process of moving stuff in and out of the MEDIA folder and forcing a re-index and reboot when it crashes I have found a file that does exactly what I suspected. The file in question is an MP3 of a DragonForce track. Presumably there's something weird about the encoding or the headers but it plays just fine on my Mac and PC. Doesn't sound like a likely culprit I know but here's what I found during my testing:

First of all I was moving stuff in a little at a time. In a previous test I'd been moving media in a letter at a time (all artists starting with A, then B and so on) I'd moved the Cs, Ds and Es all in together and the process had died. So I had a suspicion something was in one of those folders. Yesterday I moved all the As into the Media folder and waited for them to become visible in iTunes under the naslite DAAP share. When they did I started moving Ds in - a few directories at a time. Each time I waited for the files to be shown in iTiunes before playing a couple to prove they were working and then copying in a few more. When I added something that caused a crash I moved the suspect folders back out, initiated a re-index and then rebooted. On those occasions after the reboot the DAAP daemon came back and was accessible.

Following this process I finally came down to this DragonForce folder as the cause. With a MEDIA folder containing a good collection of music and with DAAP working I could copy this one folder or, in fact, just the first track out of that folder into the MEDIA folder and a few minutes later the DAAP daemon would die. The DragonForce track never appeared in the DAAP share.

Having identified a file that causes the crash I also tried emptying the MEDIA folder completely and just adding that one single bad file to see if that also caused the crash. It did.

Right now this is looking pretty cut and dried to me. I will, of course, be happy to make the dodgy file available to Tony and Ralph in the hope that it helps with their testing. It's important to say, however, that this doesn't mean there's only 1 bad file. I stopped when I found the first one causing a crash. There could well be more. It also doesn't tell us anything about the nature of the crash - what it is about this file that causes the problem. I also don't know if the file needs to be in a particular directory path. In my case it was always in a path /MEDIA/DragonForce/Inhuman Rampage/01_-_Through_The_Fire_And_Flames.mp3. I can't see why the path would matter but you never know.

Tony, Ralph - how shall I send you this file?

John

Sounds to me like the guys who wrote the DAAP Daemon should be brought up to speed on this odd problem.

Mike

We'll be very interested in taking a look at that file. Can you please ZIP it up and email it to info@serverelements.com so we can try and replicate the problem on our end.

I just emailed you the file guys. I hope it lets you replicate the problem.

John

Thank John,

We can duplicate your issue with that file.

Tony and I will look into this and post our findings.

Great news! Thanks for the update guys. I was worried you were going to say it worked fine for you.

John

Just a friendly bump.

John

The file that you passed our way did in fact have a corrupt header which was causing a problem with the daap service. Re-encoding the file resolved the problem.

I'm sure there was a fault with the file but the fact remains that there are other files in my collection with the same problem and I have no way to discover which they are. I know for a fact it's not just the files in that one folder. It's likely that whatever created that one file was used on other albums too. I don't know what was used to create that file but it's obviously common enough for quite a few files to be encoded the same way. It's even possible that the "corruption" is some form of copy protection mechanism. Corrupt or not the file isn't so badly broken. iTunes plays it fine. So does the built-in mac preview app and so does Windows Media player, my iPod, and my Apple TV.

So what's the resolution for this one? Will there be a new version of the DAAP daemon that doesn't choke on these files? Or perhaps even a version that play files that iTunes can play?

John

I understand that we have more work to do. I'm not trying to make light of the race condition created by the files in your library. We do however have to prioritize the releases.

We'll address that in detail after the v1.01 release along with other low-level changes.

And when is the v1.01 release expected? Just so that I don't waste my time bugging you between now and then.

John

First week of February.

Also, if someone is experiencing the same problem during indexing, please speak up.

I'm speaking up though I'm not sure that that I'm doing so in the correct forum thread. Apologies if I have missed something in another thread, but my problem does not appear to exactly match that of anybody else.

The HTML Server Status page shows that the DAAP and UPNP servers are enabled, but the System Status page shows no active processes or memory use. The server has only 256 MB of memory so it ought not to be anything to do with time outs during the setting up of the swap. There are no obvious error messages in Server Message Log, the last few lines of which read:

# Feb 1 09:48:40 [2] Freeing unused kernel memory: 556k freed
# Feb 1 09:48:40 [5] e100: eth0 NIC Link is Up 100 Mbps Full duplex
# Feb 1 09:48:40 [2] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
# Feb 1 09:48:40 [2] EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.19, 19 August 2002 on ide0(3,1), internal journal
# Feb 1 09:48:40 [2] EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
# Feb 1 09:48:40 [2] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
# Feb 1 09:48:40 [2] EXT3 FS 2.4-0.9.19, 19 August 2002 on ide0(3,65), internal journal
# Feb 1 09:48:40 [2] EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode.
# Feb 1 09:48:40 [2] Adding Swap: 509944k swap-space (priority -1)

On Disk-0 there is a directory named _NL_SWAP and that contains a directory named VRAM but nothing else. Is that correct?

Using Songbird (with the Daap-Client add-on) on Windows and Ubuntu, I cannot see the daap server on NASlite.

I've yet to find a suitable UPNP software client so I'm unable to be certain whether or not the UPNP server is visible on my network. I'm actually more interested in the UPNP server, but want to be certain that it works before I "invest" in a Sonos system for the home.

Any ideas anybody?